CityLab | Lisa Selin Davishttp://www.citylab.com/authors/lisa-selin-davis/2014-04-29T16:40:23-04:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p>
Some 54 million Americans over the age of 55 are hoping to grow old in their own homes, and that population should increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years. Their hope is no easy thing to realize, because most American housing stock wasn’t built grow (or shrink) with us as our needs evolve.</p><p>
But cutting edge strategies for aging-in-place are coming from an unlikely source: the university classroom.</p><p>
"We have a responsibility to train the next generation of architects to think about accessibility and housing flexibility," says <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CDMQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.interboropartners.net%2Fpartners%2F&amp;ei=j_UGUZGvGaTg0QGQqoCYAg&amp;usg=AFQjCNF7fk9_gUbPdccsNpYzK8yLvdXF3A&amp;bvm=bv.41524429,d.dmQ">Georgeen Theodore</a>, associate professor and director of the Infrastructure Planning Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. "It shouldn’t just be a niche market for older adults, but part of the larger project of housing."</p><p>
Theodore's students interviewed senior citizens to understand their needs at different stages of life, then considered the full spectrum of issues related to aging in place: connectivity, transit, density and social interaction among them. Incorporating these notions, her students dreamed up housing types and communities that could shift with the needs of the inhabitants.</p><p>
One model might look like this: a two-family house in which a young couple could live in one unit early in life, expand into the second unit when they had a family of their own, and then contract again into one unit for the empty nest years. This could work not just because it addresses the social and physical aspects of housing for older adults, but because it comes with a built-in economic angle: a family or individual could finance aging-in-place by renting out that second unit.</p><p>
"Typically, when architects design a building, they are designing it for its first users," says Theodore. "In the studio, we designed our housing and community infrastructure to accommodate change over the years."</p><p>
At Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Professor Dan D’Oca—Theodore’s partner at the planning and design firm Interboro Partners—taught a studio on age-friendly design. "We wanted [the students] to consider, and design for, this massively changing demographic," says D’Oca.</p><p>
The ideas ranged from the simple and entrepreneurial to the grand and policy-oriented. They included a power scooter-sharing program, modeled after bike shares; multi-generational playgrounds; accessory dwelling units grafted onto existing garden apartments; and a "Belt Bus" that would connect the various NORCs near the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, whose residents currently have no way to interact.</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/01/29/SCOOTER%20SHARE_Page_18.jpg" height="233" width="300"></figure><figure><img alt="" height="234" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/01/29/Screen%20Shot%202013-01-29%20at%205.07.38%20PM.png" width="300"><figcaption>A website for Share a Scooter, courtesy of James McNally (left); A "bike lane" for scooters, courtesy of Rachael Cleveland (right)</figcaption></figure><p>
Architecture and planning schools aren’t the only institutions thinking about senior housing. Some universities offer degrees in senior housing administration, and plenty of schools offer minors in gerontology. Part of the reason is practical -- elderly care is a growing field constantly in need of good recruits.</p><p>
Aurea Osgood, a professor of Sociology at Winona State University in Minnesota, spent a semester dreaming up eldertopias. "I wanted the students to make a perfect world for the elderly," she says. Her students spent the semester studying healthy modes of aging—what makes it fun and feel good to be old—and investigating things that already worked in the world around them. Small changes, like adding wheelchair lifts to public buses, were just as important as accessible housing, they found.</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/01/29/Screen%20Shot%202013-01-29%20at%205.28.00%20PM.png" height="192" width="600"><figcaption>Image courtesy of Katie Chu</figcaption></figure><p>
They honed in on the importance of inter-generational housing and activities that drew on the expertise and experience of the older generation. Aging in place is not always about the design of physical spaces, but the activities that take place within them, and who else lives there.</p><p>
“We don’t necessarily need special buildings if older adults are invited into elementary schools to spend a day with students," says Osgood, although, admittedly, elders need to be able to get from their home to the school.</p><p>
Her students proposed education programs in which seniors taught courses based on their expertise, while their young students taught them to Skype. They suggested community centers on college campuses, elder-taught cooking or gardening classes, and expanded public transit routes. And of course they focused on reducing or eliminating physical barriers. Automatic doors, ramps, and touches of universal design elements like light switches lowered on the walls were all considered.</p><p>
But perhaps most surprising to Osgood’s students was the reality of aging in America: yes, we may not be prepared for 54 million Americans to celebrate their 80th birthdays in their own homes. But things aren’t quite at crisis level. "They all assumed that older adults have it really bad and that there are only problems," says Osgood. "But they saw the positive side of aging—the joy, the health, the ability to give back."</p>Lisa Selin Davishttp://www.citylab.com/authors/lisa-selin-davis/?utm_source=feedKatie ChuIn Search of 'Eldertopia'2013-01-31T07:00:00-05:002014-04-29T16:40:23-04:00tag:citylab.com,2013:209-363404Architecture and planning schools are finally focusing on designing homes and communities we can age into. <p>
When Sun City, the first 55-plus retirement community, opened 52 years ago, average life expectancy for Americans was 69.7. It seemed like the perfect spot to live out the last 10 or 15 years of your life. They’d be golden years indeed, colored by sunny days and the carefree lifestyle of age-segregated developments: no traffic, no kids, no nonsense. Just heated pools and exercise classes and nights full of Mah Jong and bridge. Amid cookie cutter homes, retirement communities promised companionship.</p><p>
But what happens now that the average life expectancy is 78.7, and those original residents are still there, 20 or even 30 years later, having outlived their spouses and many of their friends? That’s the subject of a new documentary by filmmaker Sari Gilman called <em><a href="http://kingspointmovie.com/">Kings Point</a></em>, the name of the Floridian retirement community in which her own grandmother lived for 30 years.</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/09/28/gallery4.jpg" height="169" width="300"></figure><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/09/28/gallery5.jpg" height="169" width="300"></figure><p>
The physical structure of the retirement community model as pictured in <em>Kings Point</em>, which tends to include age-segregated housing facilities, is at best unsustainable (two-story condos were built without elevators, a design flaw that had to be fixed at great expense as the residents aged). At worst, it’s an architecture of endemic loneliness. We watch as the four women and one man who are the subjects of Gilman’s film experience the kind of isolation that these developments promised to eradicate.</p><p>
"You can’t really make friends at this age," says the white-haired Molley (who wouldn’t give her age) in the film. She, like most Kings Point residents, moved there from New York with her husband, whom she outlived. "Acquaintances, yes, and good acquaintances. But friends? No. They’re just not here anymore."</p><figure><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/09/28/gallery3_.jpg" height="338" width="600"></figure><p>
The problem as Gilman sees it lies in both the concept—the separating of senior citizens from the larger world—and the culture of retirement communities. There is back-stabbing competitiveness when hundreds of widows vie for the few single men. Social lives depend on good health, as if heart disease or osteoporosis were contagious.</p><p>
Gilman finds fault in the way these communities are marketed, with emphasis on the sporting, silver-haired set, seemingly unhampered by the reality of aging. They reflect our national obsession with self-reliance, pitting our need for independence against our need for community.</p><p>
"The more emphasis that people place on being active and independent—which are universal values, we all want that—the harder it is for people to come to terms with the inevitability of not being able to be active and independent," Gilman says.</p><p>
Of course, there are alternatives to active adult retirement communities. Assisted living; continuing care retirement communities, which have built-in medical facilities; and the most abhorred and feared of housing situations, nursing homes, are all options, if you have the money or the patience for the Medicaid paperwork. More recently, a handful of inter-generational retirement communities, such at <a href="http://www.hillcrest-village.net/intergenerational-living">Hillcrest Village</a> in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which integrate young families and even include elementary schools, have opened in the U.S.</p><p>
But even those models, with the exception of inter-generational housing, don't address the national crisis in senior living, the tainted legacy of age-segregated housing that is a $51 billion industry. We suffer from a severe lack of foresight, a shortage of personal and community planning when it comes to where and how to age. We’ve separated our elders from their extended families without replacing what their relatives might once have provided: a decent quality of life, until the very end.<br><br><em>All photos courtesy of Kings Point.</em></p>Lisa Selin Davishttp://www.citylab.com/authors/lisa-selin-davis/?utm_source=feedThe Tragedy of Modern Retirement Communities2012-10-03T08:22:00-04:002012-10-03T08:36:57-04:00tag:citylab.com,2012:209-369227When America's first "active" retirement communities opened, average life expectancy was 69.7. Now it's 78.7